My Doctor gave me a Prescription for Food

Patients want a prescription for food more than they want a prescription for anything else according to polls.

If an office displays a sign that says,  “We are a Level 2 Wellness Clinic” , the office will give you food recommendations that are based on research from the government website called Pubmed.

Why is it so hard to find out what foods you should be eating for a specific health problem?

The answer is simple.  There hasn’t been an easy place to find the real information.  There is a place where the government stores research studies.  That website is Pubmed.gov.  The problem is that this website has a lot of information to sift through.  By a lot of information, I mean a massive amount of information, 26 million citations on biomedical literature.

Let’s say a patient comes into a doctor’s office for high blood pressure and asks the doctor, “Tell me the researched based foods I should be eating for high blood pressure?”

The doctor will not have these foods memorized, so he will need to look them up.  Therein lies the problem.  If the doctor goes to Pubmed and types in blood pressure, there will be over 500,000 research studies to read through.

If the doctor could read four studies an hour and did so 8 hours per day and 5 days per week, it would take 60 years to be able to answer the patients question about which foods to eat for high blood pressure.

I am a doctor and have taught seminars for other doctors so I realized that there was a problem that needed to be solved.

I wanted to be able to quickly look up for my patients the foods they should be eating for a specific condition.  I also wanted this to be available to everyone, including both doctors and patients.

Once I saw the need, I along with Matt Fitzgerald, built a website for this reason and named it My Nutrition Advisor.

Giving nutritional advice based on research

Let’s go back to the patient with high blood pressure.

The doctor takes the patient to the My Nutrition Advisor website and brings up the page on blood pressure.  The doctor points out that there are 33 foods that positively influence blood pressure and are linked to the research on Pubmed.  Then the doctor points out that there are 53 easy to make smoothie recipes that contain the beneficial foods in them.

The process took about 2 minutes and now the patient will be able to eat the researched foods for blood pressure and may actually lower their blood pressure just by eating these foods.

The doctor has now given the patient another way to help their blood pressure in addition to the medication that was prescribed.  Another good thing about recommending the food and the smoothie recipes is that there is not a bunch of side effects associated with eating the foods and there is a ton of research on the foods.

97% of healthcare clinics off no nutritional advice, while 76% of patients want nutritional advice.

If the advice given is based off research for a specific condition, we call that a Level 2 Wellness Clinic.  Currently, less than 1% of health care offices qualify to be called a Level 2 Wellness Clinic.

The good news is that the My Nutrition Advisor website was set up so that healthcare providers and patients can easily see a list of foods they should be eating for their health problems and recipes that contain these foods.  The My Nutrition Advisor website is free to use.